North Wales Today: Slave Legacy?

North Wales - or at least those parts of it which have slate strata in the area - has always been proud of its slate quarrying heritage. 

Long before anyone in Gwynedd Council understood they could protect their jobs for a fair few years by getting behind the UNESCO World Heritage bid, locals in the area discussed, walked around and celebrated slate in their own, respectful way.

By the fist quarter of the 21st century, slate has transitioned from a useful roofing material to an infinitely more valuable commodity: tourism.

Like practically every UNESCO bid, the underlying motivation is 'economic development' through attracting hordes of tourists. In North Wales, this need for economic development - money - is desperate. What few good job there used to be in the post-WW2 era - jobs such as nuclear energy, metal smelting and chemicals - have all long ago packed-up and left. 

So you can't blame folks from trying to do something. And tourism is inevitably that something, because it's relatively easy and cheap to set up and the money will tend to roll in forever. As will the problems - and there has been an abundance of those in the post-Covid era, where millions got used to not visiting the Costa Brava and came to trash North Wales instead.

But I digress. 

Today's point is this: are we simply glorifying slate in a way that those who experienced the worst of Penrhynism, the all-controlling system of production applied at most sites, that ensured workers were constantly in fear of their livelihoods and the very homes they slept in?

The answer is complex and interesting. For sure, those in the 19th century who crossed over into the 20th would have had a pretty dim view of their working conditions, constantly eroded by the landed elite, Lord Penrhyn, who is widely despised, even today, as the man who "stole a mountain", an objectively true assertion.

The 1900-1903 'Streic Fawr' (Great Strike), rooted in dissatisfaction going back at least 25 years earlier, remains the longest-running industrial dispute in UK history. It reduced people to poverty and destitution. It turned one family against another. And it led to a very high proportion - at least a half - leaving for the South Wales coalfields and elsewhere, where the going was still tough, but the rewards somewhat greater.

'Papur Pawb', a popular Welsh newspaper, carried a number of poignant cartoons during the three year long Great Strike at Penrhyn slate quarry. The destitution forced upon his workers by Lord Penrhyn isn't something that gets nearly as much coverage as it should. It was a system of 'white slavery' in a very real sense.

 

Penrhyn was so wealthy - on the back of money made in the Atlantic slave trade - that he could afford to disregard his workers' withdrawal of their labour and simply shut 'his' quarry down, or operate it at vastly-reduced capacity, for three years.

This system - Penrhynism - is often referred to as the money made on the backs of black African slaves being reinvested back home to make slaves of white Welsh men. 

And that, too, is an objectively true statement. Quite apart from the money made from slavery itself, the system of compensating slave owners so that abolition could proceed without too much resistance, yielded over £20 million at 2024 prices for the Pennant ('Penrhyn') family, if we use the per-capita GDP deflator as a reasonable measure.

Compensation records for the Pennant slave owners.

 

Whilst quarrymen did not suffer the savage, inhuman and unrewarded treatment of African slaves, their pay was meagre at best and undermined as time went on owing to the introduction of 'middle men' to handle and award extraction concessions within a quarry - the so-called 'bargains'.

Penrhyn men's houses were often owned by the estate and that meant any resistance to the system would mean both a loss of income and a loss of home. It was a calculated system of total control over the workers: do as the Lord says, or else enter immediate destitution. It was as deliberate as it was harsh.

Of course, this was all a long time ago now. Quarries have changed hands many times and conditions within them would be unrecognisable to the men of the 'Streic Fawr'. If you ask some of the now elderly workers who are still alive as to whether they would go back to quarrying, the answer is invariably an enthusiastic 'yes!' 

Maybe they are sincere about that. Or maybe they have forgotten the hardship. In most cases, this embrace of the industry in which they worked is based on the strong comradeship they enjoyed, not what they were doing. Comradeship forged at work, under harsh conditions. Perhaps it's not unlike the comradeship of those who endured WW1 in appalling conditions, leaving a sense that, despite it all, perhaps it was the best time of their lives.

Yet, some things haven't changed. The current owners of Penrhyn quarry, which still has around 25 years' worth of extraction left and has just been granted an extension consent, is owned by those from outside the area.

The Penrhyn (new) quarry, now about to extend further south.

Welsh Slate Ltd is registered in Derby, England. It is a part of the Breedon Group, which is apparently owned by Keith Breedon, the only listed person with significant control, with more than a 75% stake in that latter company. His registration is given as Kent, England. Nothing can be found readily about him online.

So money from the Welsh slate industry would appear to be legging it across the border to England. Though Breedon and Welsh slate have of course done nothing unlawful or otherwise wrong, the money's fate remains pretty much the same as under Penrhyn, who had an imposing, oppressive fake castle home in the area, but was rarely resident there to spend much of it

Altogether, Wales ought to have made quite a large amount of money for itself from the slate industry - had that slate not been taken over - stolen in the case of Lord Penrhyn - by English elite and other capitalists of a lesser stature. 

Wales could have created a sovereign wealth fund, where natural resources on its land fed money into a fund that would pay for infrastructure and other benefits for all the people of Wales. 

But that was the heyday of imperialism. Wales was just a remote part of the UK that the English could take from what it wanted, giving nothing back. That attitude, too, is something we continue to live with today.

Whether we should be celebrating and even fetishising such an industry of exploitation - of both resource and men - is debatable. Personally, I think it's something we should recognise, but with a much better effort to recall just how bad things were for so many, for so long.